Rubber Grass

Campus heartthrob, top scholar, poet, and long-distance running champion: beneath the many halos surrounding impoverished student Guo Jianan lies a humble, sensitive, and stubborn heart. At the urging of his girlfriend Qin Wei, a native of the capital who was two years below him in the same major, he went through great difficulty to apply for graduate school at his own university, only to be reported for misconduct when the admission list was announced.

The warmhearted Jia Jingqian, Party secretary of Donggu Village, and Wang Xihua, a veteran alumnus of Bontong University, helped him find work in succession. Both slips of paper they gave him pointed to a military-to-civilian enterprise: the Weibei Electron Tube Factory. On the train, he gave one of the slips to his high school classmate Qi Hongying, who was heading to Longjiang University of Science and Technology.

He had no choice but to accept reality and work on the front line of the production floor. After a series of upheavals, he gradually adapted to his surroundings and devoted himself to both work and life.

At approximately 600,000 characters, the novel mainly follows the protagonist Guo Jianan and several classmates and friends as they undergo turbulent self-cultivation and continual growth in love, marriage, education, and careers, moving from ideals to reality and from passivity to initiative. The story spans the period of social transformation from the mid-1990s to the 2020s, covering education and employment, urban and rural life, enterprise development, and the workplace. It focuses on the advancement of China's electronic color-display technology and the strengthening of contemporary ecological and environmental governance, while featuring numerous local customs and respected community figures, conflicts, key characters, and landmark events.